Like my recent viewing of La Femme Nikita, I was discomfited by how much my memory of Juice fell short of Juice’s actuals. The first twelve minutes of the movie are just people getting dressed for school and while it does tell us some things–Tupacs dad is messed up, Tupac looks good without a shirt–it doesn’t tell us much. It plays like a goof ball buddy movie and then there is a shoving fight, a friends botched robbery and suddenly it is a drama and a serious one at that. I remember when it first came out on video and watching it often between 94-96 and being stunned by Tupac’s on-screen presence, his hypermasculinity, how he didn’t even seem to be acting. He just WAS. And now he is infinite, hologrified. Someone is very very rich off such a stupid thing and well, Tupac is fucking dead.

Last nights viewing I just kept thinking Omar Epps should have a way bigger star. Should be. When was the last time I saw Omar Epps in anything? I mean, lately it seems all I watch are Werner Herzog movies and mountaneering docs, but why isn’t he in those?

It is such a pleasure to be able to bring to you a movie nobody saw but should have. Remember Fido? Or even The Box? It’s like that! You go to the movie store and you’re like “what on earth is THIS thing I’m suddenly noticing, isn’t that the guy from Eastbound and Down,” and next thing you know you are 100% captivated by a bizarre no-genre film experience you almost don’t even know how to describe.

This is what it is like to watch The Catechism Cataclysm! It was written and directed by Todd Rohal, who I have never heard of and who has only directed 8 films, six of them shorts. It stars Steve Little, from Eastbound and Down perhaps most famously, and Robert Longstreet, who I had never seen before. And then various totally bizarre secondary characters are played by amazing weirdos.

Steve Little is a priest who is just kind of weird and dumb and doesn’t really understand what being a priest means. It opens with him telling a hilarious anecdote to a bible study class, about a woman who threatens to shoot some kids who are stealing her car, and they run away, and then she realizes it wasn’t her car after all. And the bible study class is like “Where does the message of Jesus Christ fit into this story, father?” and Little gets mad because they don’t understand how hilarious and awesome the story is. Then he goes into the vestry (?) and watches a youtube video of a guy singing every note in five octaves that I can’t describe or find on the internet but that made me laugh until I legitimately thought I would pee.

The basic conflict of the narrative is that Steve Little needs to learn what it means to be a priest, or else he’s clearly going to get fired or whatever they do to priests who are too shitty to be trusted with congregations. So he calls up his sister’s boyfriend from high school, who is is idol, and talks him into going on a canoe trip. The guy is like “I don’t even remember your sister, I have no idea who you are, I’m not a rock star I’m a spotlight operator for the Icecapades,” but Steve Little refuses to be disillusioned and off they go.

It turns into this bizarre Decameron-style stories-within-stories type of narrative. Robert Longstreet apparently was a writer in high school and Little nags him to tell him stories as they canoe down a river, clearly headed for some sort of Deliverance-esque nightmare. So Longstreet tells these strange, melancholy little fables. One is about a migrant laborer who gets walled up in the concrete supporting a freeway overpass, and is discovered there by another migrant laborer lady, who brings him cheetohs and milk every day and they fall in love. Each of these stories ends ambiguously, which bothers Steve Little, who wants to know if maybe the guy trapped in the concrete gets a boner so powerful it knocks down the freeway overpass and then they get married. etc.

Then they camp for the night and run into these crazy Japanese girls who are inexplicably also canoeing down the river, with an enormous mute black man they call “Jim.” They say their names are “Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” and that they are taking “Jim” to freedom. They make weird octopus tentacle food and tell Longstreet they don’t like his stories, and then some stuff happens that would be way too spoilery to tell you. The movie has an awesome ending.

The upshot is: this is a really weird wonderful little film. I laughed so hard but was also disturbed and even sort of moved by parts of it.

I continue to be amazed by how uncomfortable it makes general audiences when films don’t fit easily into a genre. Like Southland Tales. Honestly, I think Southland Tales is one of the best movies ever made. But everyone was like “WHAT WAS IT, WAS IT FUNNY? IT WAS WEIRD I HATE IT”

I like a no-genre thing where you’re laughing and confused and scared and then crying and then laughing again and then when it’s over you’re like “?”. It’s more like life! Talk about realistic.

It holds up!

I want to start a new feature where we watch the beloved films of our youth. Like Clue!! Did you know that a certain co-blogger was so excited to see the additional endings in the theater that she wet her pants rather than miss a single moment by going to the bathroom? That’s devotion.

We watched Billy Madison the other night. I used to own this film. I have probably seen it fifty times. It is the beginning of Adam Sandler’s brief heyday, which would continue in my opinion through exactly one additional film (Happy Gilmore) and then fizzle out in a disappointing miasma of fart sounds and adult baby men. Then it would be strangely, wonderfully revived in Punch Drunk Love and, later, Funny People. What will happen next to Mr. Sandler? I for one remain open-minded. He is capable of great things.

Billy Madison is just a really well-made comedy, that’s just a straight-up fact. My old man pointed out that it is among the progenitors of the dreaded American Pie-style gross-out teen boy comedy, but, CRUCIALLY, it has constant, colorful elements of the absurd, the surreal, the whimsical, that those movies completely lack. American Pie is like if you made Billy Madison again but with a firm commitment to realism. Like, what the shit is that about? Infinitely more pleasing to the mind and heart is a giant adult baby man chasing an enormous penguin, or breaking into an abrupt huge song-and-dance number.

I am sorry, but that closing line is FUCKING GENIUS. So surprising, so absurd, so perfectly-suited to the subject matter (3rd graders).

The children in this film are exceptionally well-cast. The movie is surprisingly, consistently endearing, in terms of Sandler’s involvement with the kids.

And if you’ve forgotten how much Chris Farley always made you laugh, don’t!

(oh link why won’t you work??)

This is classic

Shit like this is so weird, totally what makes this movie work:

“If wetting your pants is cool, then call me Miles Davis!”

Or the bizarre stuff with his housekeeper/nanny and her intense sexual advances? So weird. “You want me to take my shirt off baby?” “No thanks, that’s okay.” “Okay baby, but just remember, the offer is on the table! ha ha ha!” “WHAT A WEIRDO!”

The incredible dog poop scene, which I can’t find on youtube, although I did find several re-enactments of it made by nerdy high school boys. “He called the shit ‘poop’!”

“Why won’t you gimme a snack pack? JUST GIMME A SNACK PACK!!!!!”

Also remember how Steve Buscemi is in this movie? I love that scene. Billy, in the course of becoming a man, realizes that he was a jerk to Buscemi in high school, so he calls him up to apologize. They have this very normal, nice conversation where Buscemi says “no problem, don’t worry about it,” then Sandler says great, and they hang up. Then we stay with Buscemi, who very thoughtfully takes out a marker, and reaches over to a huge piece of paper tacked to his wall that says “PEOPLE TO KILL,” and crosses “Billy Madison” off the list. That is a stellar joke. Offscreen space, unexpected punchlines, Buscemi’s performance…come on.

The guy who plays the villain is amazing. Such a wonderful bizarre performance. “Did you see that guy’s balls?” “Yeah…they were weird looking”

Of course there is also the requisite Beautiful Woman Finding Semi-Retarded Man-Child Charming When He Grabs Her Boobs On The Bus stuff but what are you gonna do, it was the nineties

I had forgotten HOW MANY of my idiomatic speech habits originally came from this movie.

– “got any more BRAIN BUSTERS?”
– “this is the greatest night of my life” [with accompanying hand gesture]
– “you know something kid YOU SUCK”
– “yeah well ‘sorry’ doesn’t put the triscuit crackers in my stomach, does it karl”
– “Don’t tell me my business, DEVIL WOMAN!!!!”

If I could go back in time and watch Billy Madison again instead of watching the Freud penis movie I would

I am a big Sigmund Freud fan. I taught him in both semesters of my class this year and just generally think he’s really onto something, except for all the penis stuff which frankly gets a bit old. Then again when you remember his time period you’re pretty impressed even with the penis stuff. So anyway, I also love Viggo Mortensen with a passion verging on the unwholesome, and, although I strongly dislike all of Cronenberg’s early, actually-influential films, I thought Eastern Promises and A History of Violence were tremendous. All this is to say, I was kind of excited for a Cronenberg/Viggo movie about Freud. Unfortunately, this movie sucks and is so boring I thought I had fallen asleep at one point and was dreaming I was watching the film but it turned out I was still just watching the film.

It spans like 35 years or something, and mostly consists of either people reading aloud from letters or Michael Fassbender whipping Kiera Knightley with a belt. If that sounds like your cup of tea then by all means throw this DVD in the old DVD player, but frankly I found it tedious.

The movie starts off way too quickly, with Jung meeting crazy ol’ Knightley for the first time in the first 3 minutes of the film and just immediately having an enormous breakthrough via the newly invented Talking Cure. He’s like “did your dad beat you” and she’s like “I HAD ORGASMS OH MY GODDDDDDD,” like wow, psychoanalysis really works! Seems like those realizations were very close to the surface of her consciousness, just saying. So they talk about masturbation for awhile, and all the time Knightley is spasming ferociously and doing these really unhealthy-looking things with her jaw. I am not meaning to pull an Anthony Lane but it was just a really intense performance. Anyway after that like 10 years pass in about two seconds, with lots of fucking, and in between the fucking Jung and Freud write letters to each other about dreams about fucking. “Consider the possibility that the log being dragged behind this unfortunate horse represents the penis.” Oh boy did NOT see that coming!

It could have been great to watch Fassbender and Viggo play these two guys messing around with the unconscious for the first time ever. I think the discovery of the unconscious is amazing. There are moments in this movie where we see how cool the movie could have been–where it’s almost like they’re playing a new videogame and just trying shit out, like in Zelda Twilight Princess. “What if the ghost in your dream is your father?” “What if the horse represents society?” “Your dream about the carriage tells me you are sick of your wife being pregnant all the time.” Cool! Unfortunately it just doesn’t go anywhere and gets so super boring, all the weird melodrama with the patient Jung is fucking, something something Protestant something something Jew. Long disconnected middle section with Vincent Cassel explaining to Jung that monogamy is for suckers.

Viggo is of course spectacular as always. He plays Freud SO WEIRD. It may be worth seeing the film just to watch his quiet, bizarrely wonderful performance.

Then everyone is pregnant and people become doctors and WWI happens and Jung has a dream in which he foretells WWII. Then the movie ends and there’s an epilogue explaining that the amazing crazy-lady-become-famous-psychoanalyst Knightley portrayed ended up being shot with all her children by the Nazis. GREAT, LETS GO GET A PIZZA

It’s like, nothing in life is as boring as someone telling you about their dream. This is an entire movie featuring almost nothing but people telling each other about their dreams. And there aren’t even any sick Cronenberg techno-sexual fantasy sequences or anything, like, what’s up Cronenberg, have you lost your edge or WHAT?

ALSO can someone PLEASE PUNCH HOWARD SHORE IN THE FACE??????? Worst music ever. The thing about Hollywood film music is that it’s all made by basically the same 3 guys. And I think they pick and choose which scores they’re actually going to think for 2 seconds about, and which ones they’re going to have their assistants poop out during a lunch break. Shore’s score for LOTR is totally incredible–deep and complex and multi-layered. His score for the Freud movie is just this one really dumbass theme repeated on a bunch of different instruments. Through-composed full-score film music is probably the worst thing to happen to cinema in all its weirdo history. Come on, THAT was the solution? A million violins noodling endlessly, making sure I know when I’m supposed to feel sad or whatever? Jesus Christ.

Some spoilers!!! This movie is awesome, so if you haven’t seen it, don’t read this!

This movie is one of the best explorations of mental illness and its slow encroachment I have ever seen. Or, as someone who is not mentally ill (knock on wood), it seems to be the most empathetic survey of the subject I can think of–perhaps a person with mental illness would disagree. Then again, psychotic breaks are probably impossible to really capture on film, so you can only gesture at some sort of underlying truthiness. Much like drug trips. Thankfully, though, in this film there are no scenes where the camera spins around and a character laughs wildly.

I really did not like the very end, which I will not spoil. But up until that point, I was with this movie 100%. It’s slow and strange and melancholy, and shot against the backdrop of some terrible Midwestern town in the middle of nowhere. Michael Shannon plays the main guy, Curtis, a regular working class dude with a nice family. The movie opens with him watching a truly epic storm roll in across the prairie his house is on the edge of. Shannon has a great face–he reminds me a little bit of Big Ed Hurley–and he turns it up to the sky and watches the great roiling clouds expressionlessly. But when the rain falls onto him, it’s viscous and yellow like motor oil. He marvels at this. Then it cuts to the next morning, unexplained.

So he starts having these awful, awful nightmares. He dreams the storm is coming again, and his beloved dog attacks him, and it’s so real, and when he wakes up his arm hurts for the rest of the day. And he then devotes his weekend to building an enclosure out back, to lock his dog in. He won’t explain himself to his wife, who wants to know what gives. “It just has to be this way for awhile” is all he’ll say. He dreams faceless people attack his car and drag away his little daughter. It starts being a little hard to tell when he’s dreaming and when he’s awake, because the dreams start off so normal.

Meanwhile, we learn that his little daughter is deaf, and that his wife, Jessica Chastain, has her heart set on cochlear implants. The movie has this very very subtle built-in critique of the American economic and health care systems. Like a scene where Chastain is being told “You’re lucky–your husband’s insurance is very very good. Most plans wouldn’t cover a cochlear implant,” cuts to the husband picking up a prescription for 3 sleeping pills. “That’ll be $47.” “What? Well what’s my copay?” “…that IS your copay.” Or he calls his doctor and tries to get a psychiatrist appointment with somebody local, which turns out to be impossible, and the phone call takes place while he’s filling up the gas tank, and you can vaguely hear the little clicker going up and up and up, filling up the tank with dollar bills. And you’re like “oh fuck, this dude’s going to lose his job, isn’t he”

It’s so good because this guy is not a talker. He says like 10 things in the whole movie. He struggles in silence, but he’s also sensitive. So he has a couple of these nightmares and then suddenly goes to the library and picks up all these books on mental illness. And you’re thinking, well, that’s jumping the gun a little bit right? But then several scenes later he goes to visit his mother, and we slowly come to understand that SHE had a schizophrenic break when he was a child, and has been in assisted living ever since. Slowly we realize that this guy has lived with this fear in the back of his mind for his whole life–that he might one day go crazy, and have to leave his family in every sense of the word, just like what happened to him as a boy. It’s his worst nightmare, coming true now. That’s why he doesn’t want to talk to his wife about it, that’s why he’s trying so hard to get medical help that isn’t really available to him. There’s this devastating scene where he goes to see a counselor and he’s all knowledgeable and prepared, he’s got a notepad and he’s like “of the 5 signs of schizophrenia I’ve manifested 2,” etc. etc., then he’s like “so I need to get this under control so I can continue taking care of my family” and the counselor’s like “I’m not a psychiatrist and I can’t prescribe you anything. But lets talk about your mother,” and she means well, but you can just FEEL how unhelpful it is, how much like treading water it is, like this guy needs serious meds, STAT, but somehow that network of help doesn’t fully exist for him, nor does the money.

His madness starts manifesting as this desire to build a super tricked-out storm shelter in the yard. There are all these subtly disturbing scenes where, like, the wife comes home while he’s got the backhoe tearing up their yard, and she makes a “WTF” gesture at the friend who’s helping him, and the friend, totally stone-faced and obviously disturbed himself, makes this very small, slow hand gesture, like, “I know.”

I really liked how the storm shelter was JUST NORMAL ENOUGH of a thing to do that its madness was actually horrifying. Everyone in his life understands that what he’s doing is not right, something’s “off” about it, but it’s just normal enough that they can kind of shrug at it. If he were running around naked cutting himself there would be no way to avoid it, but the storm shelter is like…well, that’s harmless right? Even though everyone’s worried about it.

Ugh and of course it just spirals from there. I really think Michael Shannon is kind of a tremendous actor. He does such excellent face work in this movie. Face twitching and crazy-eyes, but then also he conveys how hard he is working to contain the crazy. And all without speaking.

It’s so good, and sad, and frightening. The movie really gets into how out of control you’d feel, how embarrassed. How embarrassing it is to go to a doctor and say “I’m losing my mind.” To ask for help in that way. It made me think about all the raving screaming homeless people you see in your life. How they were probably all once living lives of at least somewhat/more stability, but they were just enough on the outskirts economically and socially that when their psychotic break happened there was just nothing to hold them or help them. No meds for them; no social support network that could take care of them. And now they wander the streets in rags, scaring pedestrians. How do they even survive the winter. And who were they, once?

Also what is “insanity,” etc. Julian Jaynes talks a lot about how in ancient times there wouldn’t have been a concept of schizophrenia, because hearing voices and having visions was totally normal back then (due to various neuroscience stuff I can’t really go into right now, but you should read his book). You’d be like “a crazy storm is coming!!!!! YOU’RE ALL GONNA DIE” and people would be like “oh shit REALLY?” instead of saying “what do you mean, you can’t know that, because science, also social normativity, you are acting not normal, we must institutionalize you, Foucault Foucault Foucault.” He points out that as a schizophrenic, what would really freak you out and make you start panicking and running around wouldn’t necessarily be your hallucinations, it would be the fact that NO ONE ELSE SAW THEM. How isolating and frustrating. Your visions feeling SO REAL to you, so so real, that even if you were able to say “this is not real,” part of you would just never be able to believe it. Like even as Michael Shannon is trying to get on meds because he knows he’s having a psychotic break, he’s ALSO mortgaging his home to pay for this insane storm shelter. He’s living in both realities. He knows he’s going crazy, and he also knows a biblical storm is coming to sweep all of humanity away. And honestly, who knows which is real?? How come sometimes a person has a vision of Jesus and it’s a miracle, but other times it means the person is going bonkers? Time and place, etc. There’s a really sad scene where he stops his car and watches this insane lightning storm, and actually we (the viewer) never know if this time it’s a real storm or not. He watches it and says “is anybody else seeing this?” and looks back at the car where his wife and daughter are asleep. He’s alone, and you can tell he doesn’t know if it’s really happening or not. Just a quiet moment of realizing how alone he is, how alone we all are. We all die alone.

Anyway, it’s a sad movie. I also really liked the music in it.

I have been following the careers of all the people in The State basically since they were on The State, when I was in high school. In high school I thought of them as grownups, and only recently has it really hit me that they are only five years older than me. Michael Ian Black just turned forty. I know this because I recently read his new memoir, You’re Doing It Wrong, in one sitting (it’s pretty good (ok I cried)). Most of the people on The State have gone on to have more-or-less cool careers, especially the ones who created “Reno 911.” For the core threesome of Stella (David Wain, Michael Ian Black, Michael Showalter) it seems to have been a bit slower going, but of late David Wain has been getting some pretty major directing gigs (“Role Models,” e.g.). I don’t really know how the other two make livings. Really, I don’t know how most people in Hollywood make a living. But these 3 dudes have consistently put out awesome shit that exists in the far reaches of the weird alt comedy world (“Children’s Hospital,” the very weird “Wainy Days,” “The Michael Showalter Showalter,” the criminally underappreciated “The Baxter,” etc.).

Anyway, so, it is always a lot of fun to see one of these major motion pictures that on its surface is just another formulaic rom-com, but when you know it’s directed by David Wain you know you’re going to get an absurd twist on that formula that’s going to be pretty satisfying. You also know you’re going to see Joe LoTruglio naked.

Some nerd I heard on NPR was talking about how this movie plays on really predictable, tired clichés (straights meet kooky hippies; commune living) but since the jokes are bigger than you expect, it’s all somehow transformed into satisfaction. I feel like this really captures what is so wonderful about the output of this group of friends over the past two decades. We’ve seen the straight big city people encounter the kooky hippies so many times, but when you take this encounter so far that it passes into absurdity or even surreality, suddenly you have a very different kind of film.

An example: There’s a scene in which Paul Rudd is trying to psych himself up to have sex with one of the hippies, because he and his wife (Jennifer Aniston) have decided to really give this commune living a shot. He’s terrified and confused, compelled and repulsed, jealous, etc. He goes into the bathroom and starts giving himself a pep talk in the mirror, along the “come on man, you can do this” line we’ve seen probably eight hundred billion times in films before. But, as his monologue goes on, it gets weirder and weirder, until he’s doing the most absurd accents and saying the most disgusting appalling things. He moves through British to Cockney to a horrible cartoon hillbilly voice with repulsive facial expressions, talking about his “DEE-yick.” It’s so bizarre–though it feels familiar to fans of Stella and Wet Hot American Summer–that it turns a cinematic cliché into something liberating and wonderful, and you’re rocking back and forth with tears streaming down your face because you just can’t believe you’re seeing this in a film.

The movie suffers from the saggy mid-section that is inexplicably ubiquitous in this genre. When such funny people make movies, why does the middle of the movie get so slack and tedious? Even “Bridesmaids” suffered from this, albeit not as drastically as some others I could name. Katy and I speculated that it’s because once you get even slightly into the mainstream, in terms of “backers” and “studios,” you get a few too many fingers in the pie, and suddenly you’re beholden to actual film clichés, involving the introduction of conflict and then the subsequent resolution of romantic problems and all remaining difficulties, because dumbass movie people don’t think audiences can comprehend movies that don’t have these standard touchstones. In movies like Wet Hot, that were made for a nickel and had no involvement from anyone higher up than Michael Showalter or David Wain, I feel like you can see what a pure vision they actually have. Wet Hot has no real conflict to speak of, no resolution of difficulties, not even a “plot” in the traditional sense. And it also has NO SAGGY MID-SECTION. It is miles above “Wanderlust,” in terms of quality of laughter start to finish. It gives itself completely to the absurd, without being required to give any nods whatsoever to narrative traditions. In fact, part of its charm is the way it insistently makes fun of those traditions, for example in the infamous “Camp Tiger Claw” scene where Showalter basically delivers the entire plotline of a standard 80’s summer camp movie as a pep talk to the camp’s baseball team (“As everybody knows, today is the big culminating, climactic softball game against evil Camp Tiger Claw. We have put together an unlikely team of misfits, and we’ve been training like crazy all summer. Yeah, it’s a motley crew that you’d think would never be able to win a single game. We had a cooky training period where it seemed like, well, it seemed like nothing was gonna go right, but, guys, somehow we made it to the finals. So I say, when those anonymously evil campers from Tiger Claw get here, we give it our best shot, and we try to come from behind at the last minute with some weird trick play that we made up, and we win the game! Whadd’ya say team!?”), after which the kids declare it “pretty hackneyed” and decide they don’t want to engage in the baseball game after all.

It should be pointed out that Wet Hot was a monumental flop in theaters, made zero dollars, and was universally panned by critics. So maybe those dumbass movie people I discussed above actually know their audiences better than I do, which is obviously true and also incredibly depressing.

But in spite of its capitulations to the mainstream, “Wanderlust” still has enough State-like kookiness that I recommend paying good money to see it in the theater. Ken Marino has truly never been better, and here’s Kerri Kenney who you haven’t seen with those other dudes in awhile, and Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston actually seem like nice people who love one another (why is even this such a rarity in the rom-com world??), and Kathryn Hahn is awesome, and Claire from Six Feet Under is in it too! Todd Barry plays a character named “Sherm.” Michaela Watkins is completely brilliant as Ken Marino’s drugged wife. Alan Alda has a weird fight with Paul Rudd about how money literally buys nothing. There are also a lot of didjeridoos, and a “truth circle” where Kerri Kenney keeps interrupting Paul Rudd as he’s trying to speak truth to his wife by insisting that he speak truth to his wife. This is followed by a truly terrifying hallucination scene in which Paul Rudd speaks out of eyeballs turned into mouths.

And of course there’s lots of inside jokes for the heads among us, for example:
– “Love Take Me Down (To the Streets)” makes an appearance
– as does Guitar Guy from Wet Hot (who I believe is played by Craig Wedren, who does all their music)
– David, Michael and Michael play themselves in a really funny scene
– The evil corporate attorney’s name is “Jim Stansel,” which is from Wet Hot (“I’m so late. I have to go meet Jim. Stansel? You know Jim? He’s that guy.”)
– their standard trope of having a character say “I know. I know.” when someone angrily demands an answer to a specific question NEVER FAILS to totally kill me

PLOT SYNOPSIS: “look how pretty Marilyn Monroe was, such that this young man truly did wish to french her, can you imagine a more compelling tale”

The ladies sitting behind us were talking intensely about how hard it is that they have so much more money than all their friends. Hey lady can I borrow some of your problems

Things I wish I had done instead of watching this movie:
– made love at least twice
– read an entire New Yorker
– thrown my $6 out in the street
– taken the snoopy on an exciting hiking adventure
– cleaned out my hard drive
– done two loads of laundry
– worked on my new topic proposal
– hung out with friends
– reorganized my pantry
– slept
– gone to the gym
– written a song
– stared peacefully at the wall
– called Fiona back
– not spent 2 hours thinking ceaselessly about whether or not I should go get a piece of pizza and bring it back into the theater (I didn’t)
– literally nothing

NOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

NOW I WISH I’D NEVER STARTED WATCHING YOU, SPARTACUS BLOOD AND SAND!

Why give the world such a beautiful face only to take it away immediately via google?

Poor Andy Whitfield.

He was WELSH! Ugh, he just keeps getting better in my comprehension while in real life he’s been dead for four months!

Look at this shit, what even is that:

Well like any film buff worth their weight in geldings I am of course a huge fan of the original, best, and eternal Kubrick Spartacus, starring Laurence Olivier, Tony Curtis, Jean Simmons, and an extremely emo Kirk Douglas.

And, like any tired lonely schoolteacher whose husband is in Paris, I am of course a huge fan of randomly putting on Starz shows I’ve never heard of when I’m home trying to unwind myself enough to fall asleep of an evening. So this explains how I find myself deeply entrenched in the visual and aural quagmire of “SPARTACUS: BLOOD AND SAND.” Specifically, I have watched six episodes.

The eponymous fighting fellow is played by this guy Andy Whitfield, which, who is this guy? If I’m honest I will tell you 87% of why I keep watching this show is just the mug on this guy.

I don’t get how you even have a face like that. What is that, it’s like square yet round, macho yet tender, gentle yet unyielding, funny yet sad, plus a little bit of Asian or something. It is truly an amazing face–pictures can’t capture it, it must be seen in all its delightful range of motion to be comprehended. I know you think I am being snide but I am being 100% sincere. It’s weird because even though he mostly just stands around looking like that, or alternately the other half of the time he’s screaming and getting blood pushed violently out of his face in slow motion, he somehow manages to be expressive and compelling using his face parts. He also does a lot of this:

(During these parts he’s doing what his dead wife told him to do before she got naked-captured by those damn dirty Romans, which is to close his eyes and do what the gods tell him to do. Apparently the gods want him to kill an incredible shit-ton of human beings for no reason)

The story is told with lots of really over the top strange CGI effects, like not just the fact that fully half of each episode is just heavy metal music and intensely slow-mo jets of blood and flayed-open faces/internal organs, but also weird sequences where, like, cartoon leaves fall gently down around a person as they stand against a CGI sunset on a soundstage barefoot in the snow picking fake persimmons off a weird fake tree. At times it really looks like Twilight of the Ice Nymphs or something, like what the heck is going on in these crazy ancient times? I approve of this technique in my BLOOD AND SAND. If I’m going to see BLOOD AND SAND, then I want to see it in hypercolor and in slow-mo, and preferably more often than not it turns out somebody was just dreaming the whole time (actual thing I wrote in my notebook: “all anybody does on this show is have sex. Surely if you’d just been raped 100 times you wouldn’t immediately start—oh wait he was dreaming: her head just exploded).

I have given it serious thought and I really do think it is the most violent thing I have ever seen on film. The amount of slow-mo gore and screaming and intense viscera-ripping sound effects and dudes getting crucified with their eyes gouged out and various body parts lopped off is pretty non pareil. It almost becomes soothing. There are also more boobs per capita than anything I’ve ever seen, including porn. So, take that as a recommendation or a warning, as you see fit.

The plot is what you’d expect, and involves something something Romans something something Thrace something something betrayal sold into slavery wife-naked-capture-rape-terror. Spartacus (not his real name–he is nameless and the show reminds us a lot that it has been arty enough to withhold his name from us (“THAT IS NOT MY NAME” etc. “YOU HAVE NO NAME SLAVE”)) abandons his oath to help the Romans win their war against some sort of devil people, so in repayment some shitty Roman steals his wife and condemns him to die in the arena, like, buddy, you just made a SERIOUS ENEMY, did I mention the mug on this guy? Don’t fuck with a mug like that. But then instead of dying as expected, Spartacus kills the gladiators who were going to execute him, and the crowd loves it! So he gets to live, and this guy who runs a faltering gladiator school buys him and starts training him to become a gladiator. Many training montages ensue, just like Karate Kid but with more forcing people to lie face down in sand you just peed on.

Spartacus then spends five episodes scheming to get his new master (played by the AWESOME John Hannah, why doesn’t this guy win every award on the earth? Remember him delivering that Auden poem in “Four Weddings and a Funeral?” Come on!) to buy his wife back from the vindictive rape nightmare thrust upon her by that Roman guy. Then the wife turns up but all bloody and dead, and his reason for living is extinguished, so then he’s like “well fuck it I guess I’ll be a gladiator after all. And you know what, I’m gonna be THE BEST GLADIATOR I CAN BE.” He’s basically like “well, life goes on.”

I really wanted someone to give him props just for managing to even locate his wife in the first place. Nobody even had last names back then, and anyway, he did it all from this emo basement prison filled with naked men. So she arrived dead–it’s still pretty amazing he got her there at all. Nobody pointed this out! Nobody gave him a slap on the back and said “I kind of can’t believe your scheme was even this successful.”

It’s going to be annoying when he immediately gets a new love interest, but I guess that’s show biz. Also raise your hand if you think he will end the series crucified like Kirk Douglas did. Also I forgot to tell you there is a part (post wife-death) where he holds up a sword and screams “I….AM…..SPARTACUS” and I completely died laughing. THAT’S NOT HOW THAT LINE’S SUPPOSED TO WORK!

So yeah, slow-mo fountains of blood. There’s awhile where he somehow shames himself and then has to go fight in “the Pit,” where it’s basically Fight Club except you die at the end, and some of your opponents are, like, wearing the cut-off faces of the people they killed just before you, held onto their actual face by a fairly complex-looking series of hooks and chains. It is only here that Spartacus begins losing hope. This man has an iron will. I kept thinking of Julian Jaynes arguing that none of these people were actually conscious.

I consider myself somewhat of a seasoned old salty dog, but even to me there is an astounding amount of full-peen nudity plus bouncing boobs galore, including those of LUCY LAWLESS. There is lots of faux “ancient Roman” dirty talk (“do you know that the sound of your footsteps is enough to moisten my thighs”) and gratuitously-un-commented-on homosexuality. BECAUSE OF ROME. I obviously appreciate all these things.

Anyway it basically turns into a soap opera, where John Hannah and Lucy Lawless are trying to become upper class but their damn gladiators keep not being awesome enough. Lucy Lawless is having an affair with one of the gladiators, which is awkward because he’s actually in love with the slave girl who has to stand there and watch them do it seventeen thousand times a day. I really like this guy too, he’s got a great face, albeit not Whitfield-caliber.

Needless to say, everyone’s bod is smoking hot and tight as hell, except all the gross old men who actually run society, but what else is new, amirite ladies

In conclusion there is a lot of pathos, though nothing on the level of Tony Curtis reciting that poem to Kirk Douglas in the meadow.

(Also sidenote: Can you believe there really were gladiators? It’s honestly so gnarly. “Now I’ve seen everything”)

There is also a sociopathic evil scheming bitch character.